Readings in American History I:
North America from the Era European Expansion to the Formation of the United States,
16th-18th Centuries
Updated June 2013
This bibliography covers the possible Readings in American History I: North America from
an Atlantic Perspective from the 16th to the 18th century. The bibliography and the course
are designed to prepare students for the qualifying exams, help them develop the background
they will need to teach a US survey (or world history course), and raise historiographical and
research questions that they might find useful in their own work (even if they work in different
time periods). The emphasis is on cultural contact in Early America and the diversity of
sixteenth- and-seventeenth century peoples in eastern North America and the Caribbean;
secondarily, it is meant to introduce students to scholarship on the causes and consequences of
the American Revolution.
Some significant topics in early American history receive less coverage than one might wish and
are left to you to pursue on your own (see the bibliography). Students preparing for the
comprehensive examination in American history should have read at least two books from each
section and one or more articles. Some of this reading will usually be done in the PDR course,
but students are, of course, free to pursue the reading on their own.
1. Colonial Encounters
Inga Clendinnen, Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1517-1570
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1987, 2003) – 2nd edition if available.
Stuart B. Schwartz, ed., Implicit Understandings: Observing, Reporting and Reflecting on the
Encounters Between Europeans and Other Peoples in the Early Modern Era (Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press, 1994).
Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1991).
Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Indians and English: Facing Off in Early America (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 2000).
Emily Bartels, “Imperialist Beginnings: Richard Hakluyt and the Construction of Africa,”
Criticism, 34 (Fall 1992), 517-538.
John E. Kicza, “Dealings with Foreigners: A Comparative Essay Regarding Initial Expectations
and Interactions between Native Societies and the English in North America and the Spanish n
Mexico,” Colonial Latin American Historical review, 3 (Fall 1994): 381-397.
Louis Montrose, “The Work of Gender in the Discourse of Discovery,” Representations, 33
(Winter 1991), 1-41.
Neal Salisbury, “The Indians’ New World: Native Americans and the Coming of Europeans,”
William and May Quarterly, 53 (July 1996): 435-458.
Gordon Sayre, “Native American Sexuality in the Eyes of the Beholders, 1535-1710,” in Merril
D. Smith, ed., Sex and Sexuality in Early America (NY: New York University Press, 1988), 3554.
Sources: Jill Lepore, Encounters in the New World: A History in Documents (NY: Oxford
University Press, 2000).
2. Spanish Settlement and the Spanish Borderlands
Adelman, Jeremy, and Stephen Aron. “From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-States,
and the Peoples in Between in North American History.” The American Historical Review 104,
no. 3 (June 1, 1999): 814–841.
Eliga Gould, “Entangled Histories, Entangled Worlds: The English-Speaking Atlantic as
Spanish Periphery” AHR June 2007; Jorge Canizares-Esguerra, “Entangled Histories: Borderland
Historiographies in New Clothes?” AHR June 2007; Eliga H. Gould “Entangled Atlantic
Histories: A Response from the Anglo-American Periphery,” AHR Dec. 2007; Jorge CanizaresEsguerra, “The Core and Peripheries of Our National Narratives: A Response from IH-35” AHR
Dec. 2007
James Brooks: Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship and Community in the Southwest
Borderlands (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).
Ramon A. Gutierrez, When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and
Power in New Mexico, 1500-1846 (Stanford, Cal., 1991).
Matthew Restall, Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest (N.Y., Oxford Univ. Press, 2004).
David J.Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America (Conn., 1992, Yale, 2009).
Juliana Barr, “A Diplomacy of Gender in the ‘Land of the Tejas’: Indian-European
Communication in the Colonial Spanish Borderlands,” in Bernard Bailyn and Pat Denault, eds.,
Cultural Encounters in Atlantic History, 1500-1825: Passages in Europe’s Engagement with the
West (NY: Palgrave, forthcoming).
Inga Clendinnen, “‘Fierce and Unnatural Cruelty’: Cortes and the Conquest of Mexico,”
Representations, 33 (Winter 1991), 65-100.
J.H. Elliott, “The Mental World of Hernan Cortes,” in John Huxtable Elliott, Spain and its
World, 1500-1700 (NY: Oxford University Press, 1989), 27-41.
Benjamin Keen, "Main Currents in United States Writings on Colonial Spanish America, 18841984," Hispanic American Historical Review, 65 (1985): 657-682.
Miguel Angel Ladero Quesada, “Spain, circa 1492: Social Values and Structures.” in Implicit
Understandings (see above), 96-133.
Camilla Townsend, “Burying the White Gods: New Perspectives on the Conquest of Mexico,”
American Historical Review, 108 (2003), 659-87.
Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Puritan Conquistadors: Iberianizing the Atlantic, 1550-1700
(Stanford, 2006).
Classic Studies: Charles Gibson, Spain in America (NY: Harper & Row, 1966).
Sources: Bernal Diaz dil Castillo, The Conquest of New Spain, translated by J.M. Cohen (N.Y.,
1963); Anthony Pagden, trans. and ed., Hernan Cortes: Letters from Mexico (New Haven,
Conn., 1986): Cyclone Covey, ed., Cabeza de Vaca's Adventures in the Unknown Interior of
America (Albuquerque, N.M., 1997).
Surveys: James Lockhart and Stuart B. Schwartz, Early Latin America: A History of Colonial
Spanish America and Brazil (N.Y., 1983); Mark A. Burkholder and Lyman L. Johnson, Colonial
Latin America, 3d ed. (NY: Oxford University Press, 1998).
3. French Settlement: Canada, the Mississippi Valley, and Louisiana
Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution, (Cambridge,
Harvard University Press, 2004).
Peter Moogk, La Nouvelle France: The Making of French Canada–A Cultural History (East
Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2000).
Gordon Sayre, Les sauvages americains: Representations of Native Americans in French and
English Colonial Literature (1997).
Bruce G. Trigger, Natives and Newcomers: Canada's `Heroic Age' Reconsidered (1985).
Daniel H. Unser, Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower
Mississippi Valley before 1783 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1992).
Carol Devens, “Separate Confrontations: Gender as a Factor in Indian Adaptation to European
Colonization in New France,” American Quarterly 18 (1986), 461-480.
Jennifer Spear, “Colonial Intimacies: Legislating Sex in French Louisiana,” William and Mary
Quarterly, LX (January 2003), 75-98. (Issue deals with “Sexuality in Early America.”)
Shannon Lee Dawdy, Building the Devil's Empire: French Colonial New Orleans (Chicago,
2008).
Note: See also Richard White, Middle Ground, listed below.
Classic Studies: Harold A. Innes, The Fur Trade in Canada: an Introduction to Canadian
Economic History (Toronto, CN: Toronto University Press, 1956); Andrew Hill Clark, Acadia:
The Geography of Early Nova Scotia to 1760 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968).
Sources: Allen Greer, The Jesuit Relations: Natives and Missionaries in Seventeenth-century
North America (Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2000).
Surveys: W. J. Eccles, Canadian Frontier, 1534-1760 (1969; rev. ed., New Mexico, 1983);
France in America (revised ed., 1990); T. H. Breen, "Creative Adaptations: Peoples and
Cultures," in Jack P. Greene and J. R. Pole, eds., Colonial British America: Essays in the New
History of the Early Modern Era (Baltimore, Md., 1984); Cole Harris, "European Beginnings in
the Northwest Atlantic: A Comparative View," in David D. Hall and David Grayson Allen,
Seventeenth-Century New England (Boston, 1984).
4. Early Modern England
Susan Amussen, An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England (N.Y., 1994).
David Armitage & Michael Braddick, eds., The British Atlantic World, 1500-1800, 2nd edition
(Palgrave, 2009)
Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837. New Haven: Yale University Press,
1992.
Linda Colley, Captives: Britain, Empire, and the World, 1600-1850. New York: Pantheon,
2002.
Kim Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University. Press, 1995).
Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution
(London,1972).
J.P. Sommerville, Royalists and Patriots: Politics and Ideology in England, 1603-1640 (2nd ed.,
NY and London, Longman, 1999).
Jonathan Scott, England's Troubles, Seventeenth Century English Political Instability in
European Context (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2000)
David Underdown, "The Taming of the Scold: The Enforcement of Patriarchal Authority in
Early Modern England," in Anthony Fletcher and John Stevenson, eds., Order and Disorder in
Early Modern England (1985).
Classic Studies: Christopher Hill, The Century of Revolution (N.Y., 1966); Keith Thomas,
Religion and the Decline of Magic (N.Y., Scribner, 1971).
Surveys: Keith Wrightson, English Society, 1580-1680 (New Brunswick, N.J., 1982)
5. Africa and the African Slave Trade
Seymour Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery: British Mobilization in Comparative
Perspective (NY: Oxford University Press 1986).
David Eltis, The Europeans and the Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (Cambridge, 1999).
Michael Gomez, Exchanging our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identites in the
Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1998).
Joseph C. Miller, Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730-1830
(Wisconsin, 1997).
John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1800 (Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992, 1998). – 2nd edition is available.
Christopher Brown, “Empire without Slaves: British Concepts of Emancipation in the Age of the
American Revolution,” The William and Mary Quarterly, 56 (1999): 273-306.
Joseph E. Inikori and Stanley L. Engerman, “Gainers and Losers in the Atlantic Slave Trade,” in
Inikori and Engerman, eds., The Atlantic Slave Trade: Effect on Economics, Societies, and
Peoples in Africa, the Americas, and Europe (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992), 1-21.
Paul E. Lovejoy, "The Impact of the Atlantic Slave Trade on Africa: A Review of the
Literature," Journal of African History, 30 (1989), 365-394.
Jennifer Morgan, "'Some Could Suckle over Their Shoulders': Male Travelers, Female Bodies,
and the Gendering of Racial Ideology, 1500-1770," WMQ, LIV (1997), 167-192.
Claire C. Robertson and Martin A. Klein, “Women’s Importance in African Slave Systems,” in
Claire C. Robertson and Martin A. Klein, eds., Women and Slavery in Africa (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1983): 3-25.
Stephanie Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora
(Harvard, 2008).
Classic Works: Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1969).
Sources: Robert Allison, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (Boston,
MA: Bedford./St. Martin’s, 1995).
Surveys: Philip D. Curtain, The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex (Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press, 2nd ed., 1998); Paul Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery: A
History of Slavery in Africa ( 2nd ed., Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), and
Thornton, above.
6. Early British America: Chesapeake, Carolinas, and the Caribbean
Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race and
Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1996).
Lois G. Carr, Lorena Walsh, and Russell R. Menard, Robert Cole's World: Agriculture and
Society in Early Maryland (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1991).
Richard Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 16241713 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1972).
Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (N.Y., 1985).
Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (NY:
Norton, 1975).
Camilla Townsend, Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma (N.Y., Holtzbrinck Publishers,
2005).
Bernard Bailyn, “Politics and Social Structure in Virginia,” in James Morton Smith, ed.,
Seventeenth-Century Virginia: Essays in Colonial History (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1959), 90-115.
John Kukla, “Order and Chaos in Early America: Political and Social Stability in Pre-Restoration
Virginia,” American Historical Review, 90 (1985), 275-298.
Lorena Walsh, “Slave Life, Slave Society, and Tobacco Production in the Tidewater
Chesapeake, 1620-1820,” in Ira Berlin and Philip D. Morgan, eds., Cultivation and Culture:
Labor and the Shaping of Slave Life in America (Charlotttesville: University of Virginia Press,
1993), 170-199.
Sources:: Karen Ordahl Kupperman, ed., Captain John Smith: A Select Edition of His Writings
(Chapel Hill, N.C., 1988); Warren Billings, ed., The Old Dominion in the Seventeenth Century:
A Documentary History of Virginia, 1606-1689 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1975).
Surveys: Anita H. Rutman, “Still Planting the Seeds of Hope: The Recent Literature of the Early
Chesapeake Region,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 95 (1987), 3-24.
7. Early British America: The Middle Colonies, New England, and British Canada
John Putnam Demos, Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England
(New York, 1982).
John Putnam Demos, The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America
(Knopf/Vintage, 1994).
Philip J. Greven, Jr., Four Generations: Population, Land, Family in Colonial Andover,
Massachusetts (Ithaca, N.Y., 1970).
Christine Heyrman, Commerce and Culture: the Maritime Communities of Colonial
Massachusetts, 1690-1750 (NY: Norton, 1984).
Stephen Innes, Creating the Commonwealth: The Economic Culture of Puritan New England
(N.Y. 1995).
Jil Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity (N.Y.,
1998).
John Murrin, "Review Essay," History and Theory, 11(1972), 226-244, 272-275.
Classic Works: Bernard Bailyn, The New England Merchants in the Seventeenth Century
(Cambridge, Mass., 1955); James T. Lemon, The Best Poor Man's Country: A Geographical
Study of Early Southeastern Pennsylvania (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1972).
Sources: William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620-1647 (1856). Paul G. E. Clemens,
Colonial Era: A Documentary Reader (Boston, Blackwell, 2007).
8. Slavery and Race in the New World
Christopher Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill, University
of North Carolina Press & the Omohundro Institute, 2006)
Vincent Brown, The Reaper's Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery
(Harvard, 2008).
Philip Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and
Lowcountry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998).
Gary B. Nash, Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia's Black Community,
1720-1840 (Cambridge, MA, 1988).
John Wood Sweet, Bodies Politic: Negotiating Race in the American North, 1730-1830
(Baltimore, Johns Hopkins, 2003).
Kathleen Brown, “Native Americans and Early Modern Concepts of Race, “ in Martin Daunton
and Rick Halpern, eds., Empire and Others: British Encounters with Indigenous Peoples,
1600-1850 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 79-100.
Russell R. Menard, "From Servants to Slaves: The Transformation of the Chesapeake Labor
System," Southern Studies 16 (1977), 355-390.
Philip D. Morgan, "British Encounters with Africans and African-Americans, circa 1699-1780,"
in Bernard Bailyn and Philip Morgan, eds., Strangers within the Realm: Cultural Margins of the
First British Empire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 157-219;
Michael Mullin, "British Caribbean and North American Slaves in an Era of War and
Revolution, 1775-1807," in Jeffrey J. Crow and Larry E. Tise, eds., The Southern Experience in
the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, 1978): 235-267.
Alden T. Vaughan, "The Origins Debate: Slavery and Racism in Seventeenth-Century Virginia,"
The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 97 (July 1989): 331-354.
Peter Wallenstein, “Indian Foremothers: Race, Sex, Slavery and Freedom in Early Virginia,” in
Catherine Clinton and Michele Gillespie, eds., The Devil’s Lane: Sex and Race in the Early
South (NY: Oxford University Press, 1997): 57-73.
Classic Studies: David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution,
1770-1823 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975); Winthrop D. Jordan, White Over Black:
American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1968). Peter H. Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670
through the Stono Rebellion (N.Y., 1974).
9. Environment
Jennifer Anderson, Mahogany: The Costs of Luxury in Early America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2012).
Virginia De John Anderson, Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early
America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
W. Jeffrey Bolster, “Putting the Ocean in Atlantic History: Maritime Communities and Marine
Ecology in the Northwest Atlantic, 1500-1800,” AHR (2008).
William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England
(New York: Hill & Wang, 1983).
Alfred W. Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492.
Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Co., 1972.
Matthew Dennis, “Cultures of Nature: To ca. 1810,” in A Companion to American
Environmental History, ed. Douglas Sackman. Wiley- Blackwell: Malden, MA, 2010.
Katherine A. Grandjean, “New World Tempests: Environment, Scarcity, and the Coming of the
Pequot War,” William and Mary Quarterly 68 (2011): 75-100
Richard H. Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens, and the
Origins of Environmentalism, 1600-1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
Karen Halttunen, “Grounded Histories: Land and Landscape in Early America,” WMQ (2011).
Alfred W. Crosby, Jr., Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
Pekka Hämäläinen, “The Politics of Grass: European Expansion, Ecological Change, and
Indigenous Power in the Southwest Borderlands,” William and Mary Quarterly 67 (2010): 173208.
Sherry Johnson, “El Niño, Environmental Crisis, and the Emergence of Alternative Markets in
the Hispanic Caribbean, 1706s-70s,” William and Mary Quarterly 62 (2005): 365-410.
Karen Kupperman, “Fear of Hot Climates in the Anglo-American Colonial Experience,” William
and Mary Quarterly 41 (1984): 213-240.
J. R. McNeill, Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620-1914
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
Susan Scott Parrish, American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British
Atlantic World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).
Londa Schiebinger, Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.
10. Religion and Culture
Patricia U. Bonomi, Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society and Politics in Colonial
America (N.Y., 1986).
Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge, MA,
1990).
Stephen Foster, The Long Argument: English Puritanism and the Shaping of New England
Culture, 1570-1700 (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1991).
David D. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New
England (N.Y., 1989).
Christine Leigh Heyrman, Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt (1997).
Lyle Kohler, “The Weaker Sex as Religious Rebel,” in Kohler, A Search for Power: The
“Weaker Sex” in Seventeenth-Century New England (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1980), Chapter 8.
Frank Lambert, "'Pedlar in Divinity': George Whitefield and the Great Awakening, 1737-1745,"
JAH, 77 (1990): 812-837.
Perry Miller, "From the Covenant to the Revival," in James Ward Smith and A. Leland Jamison,
eds., The Shaping of American Religion (1961), 322-368.
Susan M. Juster, "'In a Different Voice': Male and Female Narratives of Religious Conversion in
Post-Revolutionary America," American Quarterly, 41 (1989): 34-62.
Richard Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (Knopf/Vintage, 1992).
Classic Studies: Perry Miller, The New England Mind, 2 vols. (Boston, 1939, 1953).
Sources:: John Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Progress (1678); Richard L. Bushman, ed., The Great
Awakening: Documents on the Revival of Religion, 1740-1745 (New York, 1970). Alan Heimert
and Andrew Delbanco, eds., The Puritans in America: A Narrative Anthology (Cambridge,
Mass., 1985).
Surveys: David D. Hall, "Religion and Society: Problems and Reconsiderations," in Jack P.
Greene and J.R. Pole, eds., Colonial British America: Essays in the New History of the Early
Modern Era (1984): 317-344; Charles Cohen, “Puitanism,” in Jacob Ernest Cooke, Encyclopedia
of the North American Colonies, 3 vols., (NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1993): III: 577-593.
11. Anglo-American Society in the Eighteenth Century
Fred Anderson, Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North
America, 1754-1766 (NY: Alfred Knopf, 2000).
Joyce Chaplin, “Expansion and Exceptionalism in Early American History,” Journal of
American History 89 (2003): 1431-1455.
Seven Hackel, Children of Coyote, Missionaries of Saint Francis: Indian-Spanish relations in
Colonial California, 1769-1850 (2005)
Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790 (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1982).
Clare A. Lyons, Sex among the Rabble: An Intimate History of Gender and Power in the Age of
Revolution, Philadelphia, 1730-1830 (2006)
Paul G. E. Clemens and Lucy Simler, "Rural Labor and the Farm Household in Chester County,
Pennsylvania, 1750-1820," in Stephen Innes, ed., Work and Labor in Early America (Chapel
Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1988): 106-143.
Paul G. E. Clemens, " The Consumer Culture of the Middle Atlantic, 1760-1820," WMQ, LXII
(2005), 577-624.
Daniel Vickers, "Competency and Competition: Economic Culture in Early America," William
and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 47 (1990): 3-29.
Patrick O'Brien, "Inseperable Connections: Trade, Economy, Fiscal State, and the Expansion of
Empire, 1688-1815," in J.P. Marshall, ed., The Oxford History of the British Empire, Vol. II: The
Eighteenth Century (N.Y. and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 53-77.
T.H. Breen, "Narrative of Commercial Life: Consumption, Ideology, and Community on the Eve
of the American Revolution," WMQ 3d ser., 50 (1993): 471-501.
Allan Kulikoff, "The Transition to Capitalism in Rural America," William and Mary Quarterly
46 (1989): 120-144.
T. H. Breen, "`Baubles of Britain': The American and Consumer Revolutions of the Eighteenth
Century," Past and Present, 119 (1988): 73-104.
James Delbourgo, A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders: Electricity and Enlightenment in Early
America (Harvard, 2006).
Surveys: David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (NY: Oxford
University Press, 1989); Gary B. Nash, Red, White, and Black: The Peoples of Early North
America, 4th edition (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2000); John J. McCusker and
Russell R. Menard, The Economy of British America, 1607-1789 (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1985); James Henretta, The Evolution of American Society, 1700-1815: An
Interdisciplinary Analysis, (Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath, 1973) – first edition preferred; E. J.
Marshall, ed., The Oxford History of the British Empire, Vol. II: The Eighteenth Century (NY:
Oxford University Press, 1998).
12. Native American Life
John Demos, The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America (New York, 1994).
Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008.
James H. Merrell, The Indians' New World: Catawbas and Their Neighbors From European
Contact Through the Era of Removal (Chapel Hill, 1989).
Jane Merritt, At the Crossroads: Indians and Empires on a Mid-Atlantic Frontier, 1700-1763
(Chapel Hill, Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2007).
Daniel K. Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).
Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region,
1650-1815 (Cambridge, Mass., 1991).
James Axtell, “Colonial America without the Indians: Counterfactual Reflections,” Journal of
American History, 73 (1987), 981-996.
James Axtell, "The White Indians," in Axtell, The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in
Colonial North America (NY: Oxford University Press, 1985): 302-327.
James Axtell, “The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures,” in Axtell, Natives and
Newcomers: the Cultural Origins of North America (NY: Oxford University Press, 2001): 145173.
William Cronon, "Revisiting the Vanishing Frontier: The Legacy of Frederick Jackson Turner,"
The Western Historical Quarterly, 18 (1987): 157-176.
Sylvia Van Kirk, Many Tender Ties: Women in Fur-Trade Society (Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press, 1980) – book or one of her numerous articles on this topic.
Bruce G. Trigger, "Early Native North American Responses to European Contact: Romantic
versus Rationalistic Interpretations," JAH, 77 (1991): 1195-1215.
Peter H. Wood, "The Changing Population of the Colonial South: An Overview by Race and
Region, 1685-1790," in Wood, et al., eds., Powhatan's Mantle: Indians in the Colonial Southeast
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 35-103.
Surveys: Colin Calloway, New Worlds for All : Indians, Europeans, and the Remaking of Early
America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Neal Salisbury, “Native
Peoples and the European Settlers in Eastern North America, 1600-1783,” in Bruce Trigger and
Wilcomb Washburn, eds, The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas,
Volume I: North America, 3 vols. (NY: Cambridge University Press, 1996-2000): I: 399-460.
13. Coming of the American Revolution
Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 1967;
1992) and Bernard Bailyn, Origins of American Politics (NY: Knopf, 1968).
Jay Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution against Patriarchal
Authority, 1750-1800 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
Edward Larkin, Thomas Paine and the Literature of Revolution (N.Y, Cambridge University
Press, 2005).
Edmund Morgan, The Stamp Act Crisis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1953)
– any edition.
Gary B. Nash, The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of
the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1979).
John Shy, A People Numerous and Armed: Reflections on the Military Struggle for American
Independence (N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 1976) – essays especially on the militia and the
ways of making war.
Fischer, David Hackett, Washington's Crossing (N.Y., Oxford University Press, 2003).
Richard Beeman, “Deference, Republicanism, and the Emergence of Popular Politics in
Eighteenth-Century America, William and Mary Quarterly, 49 (1992), 401-430.
Ruth H. Bloch, "Religion and Ideological Change in the American Revolution," in Mark A. Noll,
ed., Religion and American Politics: From the Colonial Period to the 1980s (New York, 1990),
44-61.
Ruth Bloch, "The Gendered Meanings of Virtue in Revolutionary America," Signs, 13 (1987):
59-77.
T. H. Breen, “Ideology and Nationalism on the Eve of the American Revolution: Revisions Once
More in Need of Revising,” Journal of American History, 84 (1997): 13-39.
Jack Greene, “Political Mimesis: A Consideration of the Historical and Cultural Roots of
Legislative Behavior in the British Colonies in the Eighteenth Century,” American Historical
Review, 75 (1969-1970): 337-367.
John Murrin, "1776: The Countercyclical Revolution," in Michael Morrison and Melinda Zook,
eds., Revolutionary Currents: Nation Building in the Transatlantic World (Lanham, MD,
Rowman, Littefield, 2004).
J.G.A. Pocock, "Virtue and Commerce in the Eighteenth Century," Journal of Interdisciplinary
History, 3 (1972): 119-134.
Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners,
and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Beacon Press, 2000)
Maya Jasanoff, Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (Knopf, 2011)
Classic Studies: Carl Becker, The History of Political Parties in the Province of New York,
1760-1776 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968) – or any earlier edition.
Sources: David L. Jacobson, ed., The English Libertarian Heritage from the Writings of John
Trenchard and Thomas Gordon in The Independent Whig and Cato's Letters (Indianapolis, IN:
Bobbs-Merrill, 1965): John C. Dann, ed., The Revolution Remembered: Eyewitness Accounts of
the War for Independence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). Richard D. Brown, ed.,
Major Problems in the Era of the American Revolution, 1760-1791 (Lexington, MA: D.C.
Heath, 1992)
Surveys: Edward Countrymen, The American Revolution (NY: Hill & Wang, 2003); Gordon
Wood, The American Revolution: A History (NY: Modern Library, 2002); Merrell Jensen,
Founding of a Nation: A History of the American Revolution, 1763-1775 (NY, Oxford
University Press, 1968).
14. Creation of the American Republic
Thomas Slaughter, The Whiskey Rebellion: Frontier Epilogue to the American Revolution (NY:
Oxford University Press, 1986). But see also, Terry Bouton, Taming Democracy: "The People,"
The Founders, and the Troubled Ending of the American Revolution (NY, Oxford University
Press, 2007).
François Furstenberg, “The Significance of the Trans-Appalachian Frontier in Atlantic History,”
AHR 113 (2008): 647-677.
David Waldstreicher, Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery, and the American
Revolution (N.Y., Hill & Wang, 2004).
Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (Chapel Hill, University of
North Carolina Press, 1969).
Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution: How a Revolution Transformed a
Monarchical Society into a Democratic One Unlike any That Had Ever Existed (NY: Alfred
Knopf, 1992).
Saul Cornell, "Aristocracy Assailed: The Ideology of Backcountry Anti-Federalism," JAH, 76
(1990): 1148-1172.
Paul Finkelman, "Slavery and the Constitutional Convention: Making a Covenant With Death,"
in Richard Beeman, et al., eds., Beyond Confederation: Origins of the Constitution and
American National Identity (Chapel Hill, 1987), 188-225.
Isaac Kramnick, "The 'Great National Discussion': The Discourse of Politics in 1787," WMQ 3d
ser., 45 (1989): 341-375.
Classic Works: Charles A. Beard, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United
States (New York, 1913); Merrill Jensen, The New Nation: A History of the United States
During the Confederation, 1781-1789 (New York, 1950); Merrill Jensen, The Articles of
Confederation: An Interpretation of the Social-Constitutional History of the American
Revolution, 1774-1781 (Madison, 1940).
Sources: James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay, The Federalist Papers, edited and
introduced by Isaac Kramnick (1788; New York, 1961) – or any other edition. Adrienne Koch,
ed., Notes of the Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787 Reported by James Madison (NY:
W. W. Norton, 1966).
15. New Nation: Politics and Society in the 1790s
James Fichter, So Great a Proffit: How the East Indies Transformed Early American Capitalism
(Harvard, 2010).
Ashli White, Encountering the Revolution: Haiti and the Making of the Early Republic (Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2012).
Peter S. Onuf, Jefferson's Empire: The Language of American Nationhood (Charlottesville:
University of Virginia Press, 2001).
Joanne Freeman, Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic (New Haven, CN:
Yale University Press, 2001).
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary,
1785-1812 (New York, 1990).
Richard Bushman, "High Style and Vernacular Culture," in Jack Greene and J.R. Pole, eds.,
Colonial British America (Baltimore, MD, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 345-383.
Christopher Iannini, "'The Itinerant Man': Crèvecoeur's Caribbean, Raynal's Revolution, and the
Fate of Atlantic Cosmopolitanism," WMQ, LXI (2004), 201-234.
Linda Kerber, "The Paradox of Women's Citizenship in the Early Republic: The Case of Martin
vs. Massachusetts," American Historical Review, 97 (1992): 349-378.
James T. Kloppenberg, "The Virtues of Liberalism: Christianity, Republicanism, and Ethics in
Early American Political Discourse," Journal of American History, 74 (1987): 9-33.
Jan Lewis, "The Republican Wife: Virtue and Seduction in the Early Republic," William and
Mary Quarterly, 44 (1987): 689-721.
Jan Lewis, "'The Blessings of Domestic Society': Thomas Jefferson's Family and the
Transformation of American Politics," in Peter S. Onuf, ed., Jeffersonian Legacies,
(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1993), 109-146.
Eve Kornfeld, "Encountering 'the Other': American Intellectuals and Indians in the 1790s,"
William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 52 (1995): 287-314.
Sources: Hugh Henry Brackenridge, Modern Chivalry (1792); Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar
Huntly: Or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker (1799); Sean Wilentz, Major Problems in the Early
Republic,1787-1848:Documents and Essays (Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath, 1992)
Surveys: James Roger Sharp, American Politics in the Early Republic: The New Nation in Crisis
(New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 1993).